It is series time! One topic that we haven’t really talked much about in our blog are comparison-shopping engine sites. I have worked with multiple online retailers that have seen great success with this type of online advertising. So I want to take this series as an opportunity to dive deeper into the mystery of comparison-shopping.

Comparison-shopping has been gaining a lot of momentum in the past few months. More and more consumers are looking to get the best deal on products they want to buy. While shopping in stores, people are comparing prices of the store products on their mobile devices to offers online to get the most for their money. The same can be observed when people are shopping for products online. Although you might be ranking in one of the first places on search engines and users come to your site directly, they will most certainly continue to research prices of products somewhere else. Sites like Nextag, Shopping.com and even Google and Bing are all offering an improved shopping experience by collecting product and pricing information from different retailers and displaying this information collectively on a single results page according to a consumer’s search query. Many retailers are already using this type of advertising for their products and are very successful with it. What do you need to know about comparison-shopping engines and how can you get on this bandwagon?

What are comparison-shopping engines?

Comparison-shopping engines are also called shopping search engines, CSEs or shopping feeds. As the name suggests comparison-shopping engines compare the prices on searched-for-products at different stores online. They evaluate similar merchandise for the consumer and then recommend corresponding links to consumers based on previously conducted searches. This is due to merchants providing their product data feeds to the sites. Based on the product feeds submitted, comparison-shopping engines can sort products in regards to price, shipping rates and seller ratings to make it easy for consumers to compare products in one place – fast and easy. So for example if I am searching for digital cameras, Google and other comparison engines show comparison pages, which feature different sellers that also carry the product as well as price information:

Consumers who click on any of the listings will be directed to the seller’s website. Each visit to your website will be charged on a pay per click basis by the comparison-shopping engine.

Comparison-shopping engines have seen some major growth in the past few years due to the fact that they are able to amplify ecommerce transactions. In 2012 alone, CSE traffic increased by 56% and resulted in ecommerce revenues of over $1 trillion. Google Shopping, Shopzilla, Nextag, Amazon Product Ads, Price Grabber and Bing are well-known examples amongst others.

Why is this important for online retailers?

Retailers in many industries have seen an increase in website traffic of up to 20% that can be attributed to comparison-shopping engines. As mentioned above, online shoppers spend time online to research and compare the products they want. As a matter of fact 65% of shoppers spend 15 minutes or more on comparing merchandise online. 94% of online shoppers are also investing time in finding the best-priced product before they finalize a purchase. Consumers who are viewing products on comparison-shopping engines are twice as likely to turn into a purchase. Ecommerce on CSEs is also growing twice as fast as compared to overall commerce, with Amazon product ads being at the top of the surge. Especially in the new age of enhanced campaigns and improved mobile targeting possibilities, online retailers need to be aware of the fact that 31% of all smartphone owners tend to shop with their phone. Moreover, July to December has seen a 67% increase in comparison-shopping engine transactions on mobile devices. This infographic provides a good overview of comparison-shopping engines and corresponding statistics.

How to get started on comparison-shopping engines?

To get started on comparison-shopping engines you need to create an excel file or product data feed that contains all of your product information that you want to provide to the shopping channels. Different comparison sites will have different requirements for the feed format, so check out this link with the latest information on feed specifications. Once you have your data feed aligned, all you need to do is upload it to the CSE you want to use (we will take a closer look at how to accomplish this when we talk about three CSEs in greater detail later in this series).

To make sure that your comparison-shopping engine experience is a great one, you need to keep a few things in mind:

Product feeds need to be optimized on a regular basis. Product names and descriptions should be detailed and specifically tailored towards each product.

A high quality of product images is equally important to ensure a good user experience.

As with any other online marketing efforts, create a budget plan and think about a bidding strategy. Spending more than you want to or not spending anything at all because your budgets or bids are too low are easy mistakes that can cost you a number of sales.

While product ads on CSEs are certainly not the “ad” that you are used to creating in Google or Bing, you still need to make sure that you stand out. One of the things you can do is provide detailed product descriptions and information as well as to highlight any promotions that you have currently running for products.

With your product feed set up and your strategy established you should also ensure to tag your ads with tracking parameters to be able to measure performance.

Don’t stop here though. Comparison-shopping engines don’t run your products on their own. Well they do, but you still have to stay on top of your feed inventory and bidding/budget strategy:

In part two of our series highlighting the importance of CROLP (Conversion Rate Optimization/Landing Pages), we’ll be diving into a case study of just how drastically a new landing page …

91 SHARES

Anna Pham

This is definitely so true, customers who want to search for many option for the product that they want to buy. Those shopping engines might be a big factor that lead to the decision of a customer. Popular sites might even have more power.

Christina_Hall

Hi Anna,

Thanks for your comment and for reading my blog post. We will see where the development of shopping engines might lead us.

theaterboy

The amount of click fraud that now exists in this channel makes it almost worthless from a cpa perspective. The gremlins have arrived and they are pillaging the traffic here – its almost like a total free-for-all massacre. Click behavior and user engagement across many of these services is now pointing to massive abuse.

The ‘exceptions’ are the owned shopping properties of the major search engines and any owned traffic from the various shopping services. By ‘owned’ i mean any traffic that comes directly from their sites and not the huge networks of garbage ‘partners’ they have now created to compensate for loss of traffic from Google exclusions, updates, PLA’s etc, etc…..

Recent exposure to search engine fraud detection has shed some light on the extent to which the major engines go to identify and protect against this type of abuse and after many discussions with various shopping engines, they are more than clueless. They don’t have an idea how bad it is and the extent to which they are combating any abuse is at best laughable.

Having spent large sums on these channels in the past, our budgets have now dwindled to almost nothing as we have allocated that capital to more reliable sources.

Christina_Hall

Hi theaterboy,

Thank you for reading and commenting on my post. I have worked with the major CSEs before and I have seen pretty good results. But I understand your point, click fraud is terrible and I hope that channels will find a way to better protect against that.

Wayan Garvey

Theaterboy –

We too are frustrated with the amount of fraud we suffer r on the CSE’s. Where areyou in putting the spend instead these days?